My Life As A Man

go for months at a time.” And: “I must set down my strange experience in New Milford this morning which I’m sure would make a good story, if one could write it in just the right way.” And: “I realized today for the first time-how naive of me!-that if I were to write a story, or a novel, that was published, P. would have awful competitive feelings. Could I do that to him? No wonder I’m so reluctant to launch upon a writing career-it all has to do with sparing his ego.”

Along the way there were a dozen or so newspaper clippings stapled or Scotch-taped to the loose-leaf pages, most of them about me and my work, dating back to the publication of my novel in the first year of our marriage. Pasted neatly on one page there was an article clipped from the Times when Faulkner died, a reprint of his windy Nobel Prize speech. Maureen had underlined the final grandiose paragraph: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” Beside it she had penciled a bit of marginalia to make the head swim: “P. and me?”

To me the most intriguing entry recounted her visit two years earlier to Dr. Spielvogel’s office. She had gone there to talk to him about “how to get Peter back,” or so Spielvogel had reported it to me, following the call on him, which she had made unannounced at the end of the day. According to Spielvogel, he had told her that he did not think getting me back was possible any longer-to which she had, by his report, replied, “But I can do anything. I can play it weak or strong, whichever will work.”

Maureen’s version:

April 29, 1964 I must record my conversation with Spielvogel yesterday, for I don’t want to forget any more than is inevitable. He said I had made one serious mistake: confessing to P. I realize that too. If I had not been so desolated by learning about him and that little student of his, I would never have made such an unforgivable error. If I had never told him we would still be together. That gave him just the sort of excuse he could use against me. Spielvogel agrees. Spielvogel said that he thinks he knows what course Peter would take if we were to come back together and remain married, and I understood him to mean that he would be constantly unfaithful to me with one student after another. S. has rather settled theories about the psyche and neuroses of the artist and it’s hard to know whether he’s right or not. He advised me very directly to “work through” my feelings for Peter and to find someone else. I told him I felt too old but he said not to think in terms of chronological age but how I look. He thinks I’m “charming and attractive” and “gaminlike.” S.’s feeling is that it’s impossible to be married to an actor or writer happily, that in other words, “they’re all alike.” He gave Lord Byron and Marlon Brando as examples, but is Peter really like that? I’m possessed today with these thoughts, I can hardly do anything. He emphasized that I wasn’t facing the extreme narcissism of the writer, that he focuses such an enormous amount of attention on himself. I told him my own theory that I worked out in Group that P.’s unfaithfulness to me is the result of the fact that he felt me so high-powered that he felt it necessary to “practice” with his little student. That he could only really feel like a potent male with such an unthreatening nothing. S. seemed very interested in my theory. S. said that Peter goes back over and over again to the confession in order to rationalize his inability to love me, or to love anyone for that matter. S. indicates that this lovelessness is characteristic of the narcissistic type. I wonder if S. is fitting Peter into a preconceived mold, tho’ it does make great sense when I think of how rejecting of me P. has been from the very beginning.

I thought, upon coming to the end of that entry, “What a thing- everybody in the world can write fiction about that marriage, except me! Oh, Maureen, you should never have spared my ego your writing career-better you should have written down everything in that head of yours and spared me all this reality! On the printed page, instead of on my hide! Oh, my one and only and eternal wife, is this what you really think? Believe? Do these words describe to you who and what you are? It’s almost enough to make a person feel sorry for you. Some person, somewhere.” During the night I paused at times in reading Maureen to read Faulkner. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” I read that Nobel Prize speech from beginning to end, and I thought, “And what the hell are you talking about? How could you write The Sound and the Fury, how could you write The Hamlet, how could you write about Temple Drake and Popeye, and write that?”

Intermittently I examined the No. 5 Junior can opener, Maureen’s corncob. At one point I examined my own corncob. Endure? Prevail? We are lucky, sir, that we can get our shoes on in the morning. That’s what I would have said to those Swedes! (If they’d asked.)

Oh, there was bitterness in me that night! And much hatred. But what was I to do with it? Or with the can opener? Or with the diary confessing to a “confession”? What was I supposed to do to prevail? Not “man,” but Tarnopol!

The answer was nothing. “Tolerate it,” said Spielvogel. “Lambchop,” said Susan, “forget it.” “Face facts,” my lawyer said, “you’re the man and she’s the woman.” “Are you still sure of that?” I said. “Piss standing up and you’re the man.” “I’ll sit down.” “It’s too late,” he told me.

Six months later, on a Sunday morning, only minutes after I had returned from breakfast and the Times at Susan’s and was settling down at my desk to work-the liquor carton had just been dragged from the closet, and I was stirring around in that dispiriting accumulation of disconnected beginnings, middles, and endings-Flossie Koerner telephoned my apartment to tell me that Maureen was dead.

I didn’t believe her. I thought it was a ruse cooked up by Maureen to get me to say something into the telephone that could be tape-recorded and used to incriminate me in court. I thought, “She’s going back in again for more alimony-this is another trick.” All I had to say was, “Maureen dead? Great!” or anything even remotely resembling that for Judge Rosenzweig or one of his lieutenants to reason that I was an incorrigible enemy of the social order still, my unbridled and barbaric male libido in need of yet stronger disciplinary action.

“Dead?”

“Yes. She was killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At five in the morning.”

“Who killed her?”

“The car hit a tree. Bill Walker was driving. Oh, Peter,” said Flossie, with a rasping sob, “she loved life so.”

“And she’s dead…?” I had begun to tremble.

“Instantly. At least she didn’t suffer…Oh, why didn’t she have the seat belt on?”

‘What happened to Walker?”

“Nothing bad. A cut. But his whole Porsche was destroyed. Her head…her head…”

“Yes, what?”

“Hit the windshield. Oh, I knew she shouldn’t go up there. The Group tried to stop her, but she was just so terribly hurt.”

“By what? Over what?”

“What he did with the shirt.”

‘What shirt?”

“Oh…I hate to say it…given who he is…and I’m not accusing him…”

“What is it, Hossie?”

“Peter, Bill Walker is a bisexual person. Maureen herself didn’t even know. She-“ She broke down sobbing here. I meanwhile had to clamp my mouth shut to stop my teeth from chattering. “She-“ said Hossie, starting in again, “she gave him this beautiful, expensive lisle shirt, you know for a present? And it didn’t fit-or so he said afterward- and instead of returning it for a bigger size, he gave it to a man he knows. And she went up to tell him what she thought of that kind of behavior, to have a frank confrontation…And they must have been drinking late, or something. They had been to a party…”

“Yes?”

“I’m not blaming anyone,” said Flossie. “I’m sure it was nobody’s deliberate fault.”

Was it true then? Dead? Really dead? Dead in the sense of nonexistent? Dead as the dead are dead? Dead as in death? Dead as in dead men tell no tales? Maureen is dead? Dead dead? Deceased? Extinct? Called to her eternal rest, the miserable bitch? Crossed the bar?

“Where’s the body?” I asked.